Longevity
Groundbreaking Cancer Therapy
A revolutionary ultrasound therapy could combat cancer in the future by activating the immune system—similar to a vaccine.
Longevity
A revolutionary ultrasound therapy could combat cancer in the future by activating the immune system—similar to a vaccine.
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Cancer is a serious disease that has many facets.
There is no single tumor, and even in cancer, different tumors in the body can have different metabolic profiles, which can make treatment fundamentally very complicated. Additionally, patients often require surgery, which increases the body's burden. While chemotherapies today are much more efficient than a few decades ago, they are known to be genotoxic, which increases the risk that a new cancer will eventually develop.
In recent years, immunotherapy has made tremendous progress. In the future, cancer could perhaps be treated like a virus or bacterium. This is because every body has the potential to destroy tumor cells. In healthy people, this happens throughout old age – the immune system constantly destroys degenerated and incorrectly programmed cells. Completely normal. However, in 20–30% of us, the immune system fails so thoroughly that we die from cancer.
And there is a reason for this: tumors actively hide from the immune system. They camouflage themselves well or suppress the immune system locally so it cannot work. That's why researchers are looking for ways to sharpen the immune system again, so it "sees" the tumor and has the power to destroy it. We have reported on such possibilities many times before.
A completely new approach is what is called histotripsy. In this technique, high-intensity ultrasound waves are directed locally from outside onto the affected tissue. They create tiny bubbles or cavities in fluids within tissues. Including in tumor cells. When they implode, they destroy cancer cells. This can be done so precisely that healthy tissue is not affected.
This technique has existed for 1–2 decades. However, its use in cancer therapy is completely new, and clinical trials are only now beginning. Current research in mice is groundbreaking. The sound waves alone appear to make the majority of animals sustainably tumor-free, even when not the entire tumor itself is killed by the sound waves.
And here comes the sensational point, regarding the immune system: burst tumor cells are no longer invisible to the immune system. The proteins that the tumor cell releases are recognized by the immune system like proteins from viruses or bacteria – these are called antigens. The result is a robust immune response, through which the immune system kills the rest of the tumor.
What is truly sensational about these findings and the reason we report on them at all is that researchers extracted parts of the tumor destroyed by ultrasound from one animal and injected them into another animal, which then became extremely resistant to this cancer. This is, so to speak, the primal principle of vaccination: you give the immune system information about a pathogen, which triggers an immune response and protects against the disease.
"The injection of the debris into a second mouse had almost a vaccine-like property," said one author of the study. "Mice that received this debris were remarkably resistant to cancer growth."
Certainly, one could extract these "cell debris" along with the antigens from the patient, purify them, and administer them again as a vaccine to force an immune response. It would even be conceivable to inject tumor antigens into an animal to obtain tumor-specific antibodies. But these are just our thoughts as laypeople in this field.
This principle opens up entirely new possibilities in immunotherapy. After all, researchers have so far tried to develop vaccines or antibodies against certain proteins. However, this is enormously time-consuming and, in the final analysis, if it works, also a deep intervention in physiology, often accompanied by severe side effects.
Instead, this method draws on ancient and inherent principles of the immune system. Perhaps we'll hear about it more often in the future. Hopefully ;) Because for such therapies to really be used widely... it has to be profitable for pharmaceutical companies. And it can be doubted whether such a therapeutic form would generate enough profit. We'll see.
We can note this: the immune system is once again the key.
(Source: University of Michigan. [source no longer available] ScienceDaily.)
